ABSTRACT
Visual scan pattern distributed across the interior of an aircraft flight deck and the exterior of the cockpit is a sensory register process for investigating pilots’ operational behaviours connected with what areas they scanned, what stimulus they perceived, and what actions they projected. Eye movements are closely linked with visual attention, which can reveal pilots’ attention allocation on the areas of interested (AOIs) and can be analysed to explore how much effort and shifting attention occurred during performing visual tasks (Kowler, 2008). An eye tracker is a relevant tool for understanding pilots’perceptual errors which are in turn related to 75% of human factors incidents in flight operations (Jones and Endsley, 1996).
A previous study indicated that a human’s fixation points are not strongly related to salient objects, but rather the meaningful places for the task that is being undertaken (Henderson, 2003). Fixation duration came from deliberate consideration and induces more fixation points for acquiring more detail information (Mecklenbeck, Kühberger, and Ranyard, 2011). However, it is necessary to monitor those eye movement data combined with a holistic task flow for a precise interpretation based upon frequency of fixation and fixation duration data recoded from an operator’s behaviour patterns (Kilingaru, Tweedale, Thatcher and Jain, 2013). Pilots not only
have to distribute attention for seeking and decoding the information based on visual scans, but also perceive and filter those salient cues by attention distribution during flight operations. Therefore, it was suggested that visual attention is a precursor to initiate the cognitive process (Lavine, Sibert, Gokturk, and Dickens, 2002).
